Not a great idea for Valentines but if you have paid for a funeral recently you may be shocked at the cost of one even with no bells and whistles. Really not a bad idea to pre-arrange funeral. None of us are getting out alive.

A couple of years ago we went to morning Mass, breakfast, then to the range and shot a couple hundred rounds between the two of us, went to the church office, bought our burial plots in the church cemetery, went for dinner, came home and laughed our asses off at our eclectic day.

Not making arrangements for the funerals. That’s up to the kids. Gotta give them something to do.

For Emotional Extortion Day this year, I got my wife a nice sampler set of premium coffee blends. Only, then, did she tell me that she never drinks coffee. Imagine that… 23 years of marriage and I never noticed that. tsk tsk… Silly me… But, hey, what can I say?… Waste not, want not… (slurp!)… Mmmmm… That’s some good coffee.

BUT for the surviving spouse some nasty surprises may arise. A pre-arranged funeral is, of course, not paid for. It will absolutely cost waaaayyy more when “the time comes”. A pre-arranged AND “pre-paid” funeral will almost certainly have a cost correction at the time your loved one passes. We encountered this. We thought we had arranged, AND FULLY PAID FOR, a very lux funeral, only to be informed that since prices had risen in the “past six years” the original arrangements could not be accommodated and we would need to make more economical substitutions. WTF? We already had a burial lot, we had a very small service and only one two hour visitation – but they claimed that the funeral and casket we had FULLY PAID FOR had doubled in price in just six years. SHOP AROUND.

Oh, and my Valentines Day was lovely. Hubby laid the table (while I was at work) and brought some flowers – he arranged them for me himself. Brought some of my favorite chocolate “by the pound” selections at Gertrude Hawk which were put into a velvet heart-shaped box we had saved to reuse this way. 🙂 Trust me – that cost about 1/4 the price of buying a 3/4 lb pre-packed box of Valentines chocolate (AND I get the stuff I like best). I ordered dinner take-a-way, and he picked it up. We had a cheap bottle of Champagne while we ate, and listened to romantic music. Then we sat and watching TV while holding hands. That.